Wow, I almost let February go by without a post! What a tragedy that would have been, and that’s no lie.

(Forgive the tone, I’ve been watching a lot of the old 80’s Ed Grimley cartoon*, and after a while it seeps into your blood. It’s like watching Betty Boop cartoons–watch more than five or six, and you start moving that way–you can’t just get up from a chair, you’ve got to syncopate yourself out of it. It’s the same with Ed, but with talking more than moving, which probably affects posting rather more than Betty, I must say.)

Anyway, I’ve been busy with stuff–finally posted “Part Two” of my animation project and have been working on “Part Three” (somewhat) diligently since then, with some extremely decent results, just hoping to finish before…you know.

No painting, at least so far. Tinnitus still is an issue, but then, it would be, wouldn’t it?

And I suppose that will suffice as a totally decent entry for the month–oh, and if that’s not an excuse we won’t be hearing again. Because we totally will.

Thanks for visiting, as always. See you in the future, which is already in progress!

So, it’s a new year, and, well, I guess it has been for a couple of weeks now. And what is there to show for it?

Well, this, from several years ago —

–bad photograph and all, has been transformed into this–

–and I think it’s been immeasurably improved, and now goes onto the wall as “finished.” The straight, horizontal lines, suggesting walls, really made this one come together. And the background “figure” gives it a good sense of a series of beings proceeding forward, if beings they are. (Confession: I used PhotoShop to take out the worst of the camera flash reflections, but this is still really close to what it actually looks like.)

Still it’s nothing that anyone, anywhere, is going to want to hang on a wall, but I like it, and I think it accompanies this one–

–very well indeed, like the front and back covers of a fairly good pulp novel. Or even better, a series of pulp novels.

Now that would be something. Any pulp novelists out there want to work out a deal? Or have pulp novelists slithered away into the woodwork once the 1930’s became the 1940’s? A question for the pulpologists out there.

Let me confess–since I’ve been working on an hourly basis (several years, now), the holidays are even more depressing than they normally are. Aside from the obvious, for hourly folks, a “holiday” means “No. You can’t can’t earn money today–it’s a holiday. So, no, you can’t pay your bills–not enough earned hours.” No, no paid holidays for you. As you might imagine, that tends to color certain events–

Anyway, here’s a present, made for a friend this season. Since I have no money, it’s a painting. Fall foliage as seen on a morning when the fog is just now dissipating. And if you like it, happy holidays to you, too.

So, the last project kind of stalled, so here’s something new. Unexpectedly, I didn’t document the very beginnings of this piece, but we’ll pick it up as we go along.

What I did was take an old canvas that was never going to work, and covered it with (I thought) raw umber–what I use for black. I may have used burnt umber instead, as it looks pretty brown. I painted a couple of shapes at the bottom and top, using titanium white. Here’s the earliest shot I have.

As you can see, I then did a bunch of detail work in the lower shape, again using raw umber.

The shape at the top of the painting suggested a crashing wave, so I worked toward that goal.

Added some detail work to that–

I then wondered if these two areas could be connected by the middle. Something suggested the water beneath the crashing waves, blending into what would become the “sea floor” in the bottom window. So I set to work with that.

Then, using raw umber, I built up into the green so that the two would blend. Added some yellow to the green for highlighting at the top, some vague white shapes in the bottom, and a middle streak of black. I tend not to use black–it stands out too much from the rest of the palatte–but it seemed to work here. Though you’ll note in the next picture that it doesn’t photograph very well.

And that’s where it stands as of today. It has actually gone pretty quickly–the above has mostly been done in the last couple of weeks, with pauses to allow for drying time.

Really bad photo, but no matter! There’s another really bad photo to follow.

I liked this image, but it always nagged at me as being incomplete. Yeah, yeah, some folks might like it because it’s calm and soothing, but there was always–for me–something not quite there.

I suspect it’s because I always want images to hint at a story. Something more than the image itself, something that projects beyond what’s actually on the canvas. And this one just…sat there pleasantly.

You’ll note the flash highlights in the middle right…well, that’s because I’ve recently moved and I have no idea where I packed the Really Good Flash, so I’m having to use the Built-In Flash.

I realize the eclipse happened last week, but I’ve only just put my computer back together after the move. So here are some shots of the eclipse as it happened.

All of them were shot through my Nikon D70 using a neutral density filter, except for those where the coverage was as close as it got to total. For those I just used the camera as is. As you can see, most of the images look like someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing messing around with MS Paint.